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where to buy bulk bread flour

September 23, 2009 - 3:01pm

mariacuellar

where to buy bulk bread flour

Where can I buy bulk bread flour online? I don't have much money, but I want to make lots of bread because I'm experimenting with new recipes. I bake bread almost every day, so I need lots of flour. I also need all-purpose flour, but less urgently.

My last purchase was $18.68 for 50 lbs of their Special Spring Patent flour. From what I can tell this flour is equivalent to KA bread flour, wihich sells for about $5 for a 5 lb bag around here (central Jersey). It's an amazing deal. I freeze what I'm not going to use soon.

If you live in Southern California, there's a retail store that just opened up in Rancho Cucamonga that specializes in bulk products. Its called Honeyville Farms. you can buy grains, rice flours and an entire range of wheat flours from cake/pastry flours to 14% Hi Gluten flours. Their website is www.honeyvillegrain.com They have a nice online store as well.

Honeyville's online store is expensive, but the retail stores are much cheaper. They have cheap shipping so they compensate with higher prices on some items ( I think). 50lb bags of Hi gluten four (14% protein) are around $20.00 or so.

The shipping will kill you. Best bet is a restaurant supply that will sell to non businesses (ours will). King arthur doesn't have great distribution in some areas(our nearest source of 50 lb bags is 4 hours away). But General Mills stuff is widely available. We get 50lb bags of All Trumps for about 19 bucks, and 25 lbs of H&R (which is an all purpose) for around 12. These should be pretty common

My mother grew up relatively poor in the 1930s and she used to say "weevils are cheaper than nuts and just as crunchy". That said, neither she nor most people today care to eat insects in their flour.

I think the key word here is "garage" (and I am assuming here your house is in North American or UK/northern Europe). Modern houses can be kept reasonably free from insects with some effort, but insect are nothing if not persistent and will eventually explore just about everywhere outside a house or in. Most people today keep their kitchens fairly clean and the foodstuffs rotate through the shelves quickly, so the insects never get established inside.

But garages are generally not designed to be 100% weathertight or resistent to intrustion of insects. Your garage pantry was probably intended for storage of canned and jar foods, not boxed or bagged foodstuffs that can be directly attacked by insects.

If you do want to store the flour out there, you need a sealed metal storage cabinet similar to what was used on sailing ships to store flour and biscuit (and for the same reason). 100% metal-lined with full sealing strips on the doors. Note that in our garage mice chewed through a plastic garbage can (plastic maybe 3mm thick) to get at a tasty bag of garbage, so a plastic cabinet probably isn't sufficient.

This all assumes that your flour provider is not shipping you flour with insect eggs in it. I believe there are simple tests that you can find via Google to find out if this is happening.

Most of the time, your flour comes with pest eggs/larva in it. The eggs/larva grow up into grown-up pests, which is why you don't see them until you've had your bag of flour for awhile. They aren't getting in, they are getting out. You might want to compare suppliers or discuss this with your current one, especially if it is pesticide-free.

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